For eight and a half years, Rikki Jo Neyer watched her mother vanish into an illness that doctors could not name. Her mother wore sunglasses indoors, not for style, but because light had become unbearable. Eventually, she fell into what Neyer describes as catatonia that went unrecognized. The family's desperate search for answers and the extraordinary recovery that followed are the subject of Neyer's debut book, Do You Believe in Miracles? Our Journey Out of Darkness and Into the Light.
The book matters because it gives voice to a reality that countless caregivers face: loving someone fiercely while navigating medical uncertainty and fighting to be heard by a system that often looks away. Neyer's mother could not always advocate for herself, so Neyer became her voice. "I did not set out to become an author," Neyer says. "I set out to survive a season that felt impossible. For eight and a half years I watched my mother disappear into an illness no doctor could name, and I realized that if I did not write it down, the world might never know what she went through."
Unlike traditional inspirational memoirs that begin with the miracle and work backward, Neyer deliberately invites readers into the darkness her family endured. "Most miracle stories begin with the miracle and work backward," she explains. "This one makes you live through every year of the darkness before you get there." That darkness ended when her mother received Ativan and woke from the catatonic state. Her mother later summarized the experience: "I did die. And God brought me back."
For Neyer, the recovery did not erase the years of suffering but gave them new purpose. "This book required me to go back into rooms I had worked very hard to leave," she says. "The dark years, the doubt, the moments when my faith was barely a thread." She resisted the temptation to sanitize those memories. "The reader who is sitting in their own dark room right now does not need a polished version of suffering," she says. "They need the truth."
That honesty distinguishes the book from a typical inspirational memoir. It brings together faith, caregiving, medical questions, family experience, and firsthand testimony. It also includes four interviews with key witnesses, a scientific summary of catatonia, Scripture, and appendices written specifically for caregivers, people struggling to keep going, and those trying to support someone they love.
Neyer's experience as her mother's primary advocate gives those resources particular weight. She hopes the book will reach other families asking painfully familiar questions. "I hope caregivers feel seen in a way that nothing else has made them feel seen," she says. "I hope anyone who has ever loved someone through a darkness that has no name finds language for what they have been carrying." She also hopes it encourages readers facing unexplained symptoms or a diagnosis that does not account for what they are witnessing. "I hope anyone sitting with a misdiagnosis or fighting to be believed by a medical system that keeps looking away finds courage in these pages to keep asking questions," she says.
At its core, the book asks the question in its title. Neyer does believe in miracles. "And I hope every reader who has ever wondered whether God still finds people in the darkest places finds their answer here," she says. "He does. I am living proof. My mother is living proof."
The years of caregiving transformed Neyer's understanding of beauty, suffering, and faith. She came to see beauty and suffering as companions, not opposites, and that hope can remain even when circumstances offer little evidence of change. She describes the journey of writing in three words: "Witness. Endure. Return."
Perhaps most importantly, the book is being published while Neyer and her mother can share the story together. Her mother is alive, participated in the book, and after eight and a half years that once seemed to have stolen so much, mother and daughter are making up for lost time. The book is available from Lucid Books, an independent hybrid publisher in the Houston area.
